WASHINGTON - Caught between the
need to explore a possible diplomatic way out of
an otherwise hopeless mess in Iraq and the
domestic political need to keep the Democrats on
the defensive, US President George W Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney are playing a double game on
the issue of a timetable for withdrawal.

For many months, the Bush White House has
been attacking some Democrats in Congress for
calling for a timetable for troop withdrawal from
Iraq. Cheney condemned such proposals in a CNN
interview June 22 as "the worst possible thing we
could do", and portrayed them as "validating the
theory that the Americans don't have the stomach
for this fight".

But for the past six
months, the Bush administration has been

secretly pursuing peace
negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, in which
it has explicitly accepted the principle that an
eventual peace agreement will include a timetable
for US withdrawal.

The double game began
when US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced last
November that he was prepared to open negotiations
with the Sunni insurgents, to whom he referred as
"nationalists". That was just a few days after the
spokesman for the US military command in Iraq said
its objective was no longer to "defeat" the
insurgents, as distinct from foreign terrorist
groups. About six weeks later, Khalilzad began
meeting with leaders of the insurgent groups,
according to an insurgent leader interviewed by
the London-based Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. In the
interview, published on May 3, the insurgent
leader revealed that representatives of more than
10 armed organizations met with Khalilzad on seven
occasions between January 16 and the end of
February.

The focus of the talks,
according to the insurgent leader's account, was
US withdrawal from Iraq. He said the insurgents
gave Khalilzad a draft memorandum of understanding
on a settlement. He did not reveal the contents of
the document, but the Associated Press, citing
insurgent and government officials, reported on
June 28 that 11 insurgent groups had offered to
halt all attacks in return for a two-year
timetable for US troop withdrawal.

Khalilzad promised to get back to them
with a US response before the new government had
been formed, according to the insurgent's account,
but the Sunnis never heard from him again, and
informed the US Embassy on April 20 that they were
breaking off the talks.

Khalilzad's
failure to respond suggests the White House was
not yet prepared to have the administration take
direct responsibility for a settlement involving a
timetable for withdrawal. But that did not mean it
was unwilling to participate in a process under
which the Iraqi government would officially take
responsibility for such a settlement.

Some
time in early 2006, according to an aide to Iraqi
President Jalal Talabani, seven Sunni insurgent
groups - all of which had been among the
organizations that met with Khalilzad - began
meeting with the president, a Kurd who had
indicated his willingness to negotiate with the
insurgents the previous November. Beginning some
time in April, the US Embassy joined in the
meetings with the insurgency, as Talabani revealed
and the US Embassy confirmed to the media on May
1.

The central issue in these negotiations
was a timetable for US withdrawal, according to a
representative of one of the seven groups, the
Islamic National Front for Liberation of Iraq. The
negotiations made significant progress. Talabani
told The Times of London on June 23 that the
insurgent groups had communicated through an
intermediary that they were prepared to finalize
an agreement with the United States and Iraq.

This is where the "national reconciliation
plan" of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
entered the picture. The first draft of the plan,
which was circulated to members of the Iraqi
parliament in the week of June 18, incorporated
the central elements of the peace settlement that
had been discussed in the three-way negotiations.
Among these was agreement on an explicit timetable
for troop withdrawal that would take into account
the completion of the process of training Iraqi
security forces.

The Times, which obtained
a copy of that first draft, reported on June 23
that it said, "We must agree on a time schedule to
pull out the troops from Iraq, while at the same
time building up the Iraqi forces that will
guarantee Iraqi security, and this must be
supported by a United Nations Security Council
decision."

The sentence about the need for
a withdrawal timetable was removed from the final
version of the document made public on June 25, or
watered down beyond recognition - reportedly
because of opposition by militant Shi'ite party
leaders.

Nevertheless, senior US officials
in Baghdad were dropping clear hints that the
United States would support negotiation of a peace
agreement based on the points that had been
dropped from the original draft.

Khalilzad
revealed in an interview with Washington Post
columnist David Ignatius published on June 28 that
General George Casey, the US military commander in
Iraq, was about to meet with Maliki to form a
joint US-Iraqi committee to decide on "the
withdrawal of US forces and the conditions related
to a road map for an ultimate withdrawal of US
troops".

Khalilzad told Ignatius that
there was no "automatic timetable for withdrawal"
- an artfully ambiguous formula that should be
interpreted in light of the interview which
another senior US official gave to Newsweek and
The Times on June 24 on condition that he be
identified as a "senior coalition military
official".

The official refused to rule
out the idea of timetable for withdrawal,
suggesting that "a date" was "the sort of
assurance that [the Sunnis] are looking for". He
went on to state that, "if men of good will sit
down together and exchange ideas [about
withdrawal], which might be defined either by a
timetable or by ... sets of conditions, there must
be a capacity to find common ground".

The
language in Maliki's first draft, which US
officials themselves helped negotiate, appears to
be just the kind of common ground Khalilzad and
the "senior coalition military official" - almost
certainly Casey himself - had in mind.

It
may be that Khalilzad and Casey are merely aiming
to keep the insurgents interested in a peace
agreement while keeping such an agreement just out
of reach. But the evidence suggests that Bush has
agreed to position the administration for an
eventual peace agreement with the insurgents if
that turns out to be necessary to avoid a disaster
in Iraq.

Whatever the calculation behind
the diplomatic acceptance of a withdrawal
timetable, Bush and Cheney are clearly determined
to continue their attack on Democrats who call for
a timetable for withdrawal as playing into the
hands of the terrorists - especially with the
congressional election approaching.

Bush's
double game has worked because the Democrats have
failed to make the key point that a withdrawal
timetable is indispensable to a peace settlement
with the Sunnis, and that Bush has been acting on
the basis of that reality, even as he argues the
exact opposite when the Democrats support it.

The reason for that signal failure is that
the Democrats' foreign-policy leaders have not
made the necessity for a diplomatic solution to
the war central to their position. That turns out
to be a serious weakness not only on substantive
policy but on the politics of national security as
well.

Gareth Porter is a
historian and national-security policy analyst.
His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in June 2005.